The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,422 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 51% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 46% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.6 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 62
Highest review score: 100 Badlands
Lowest review score: 0 A Life Less Ordinary
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 5,575 out of 10422
  2. Mixed: 3,739 out of 10422
  3. Negative: 1,108 out of 10422
10422 movie reviews
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  1. All or Nothing
    It's a hard-won comfort, found here over a bleak stretch of days, but All Or Nothing makes it look like the best life has to offer.
  2. Bowling for Columbine
    Often uproariously funny, even though much of its queasy power comes from its acknowledgment that some matters are too horrifying to be washed away with cheap laughter, or packaged into soundbites.
  3. Brittany Runs A Marathon
    Brittany Runs A Marathon winds up feeling like a story told by an outsider who’s empathetic toward, but not fully immersed in, a specific lived experience.
  4. Alléluia
    Was there a pressing need for yet another rendition of this story? Should it come around again (and it likely will), a unique perspective on the events would be welcome.
  5. Millennium Mambo
    Millennium Mambo is a resolutely minor work, so enveloped in ennui that it never gets past the surface of things. But those surfaces are remarkable.
  6. Girl with a Pearl Earring
    Webber displays a great sense of understatement and a keen eye for careful framing, with cinematographer Eduardo Serra beautifully re-creating Vermeer's signature play of shadow and light.
  7. Promising Young Woman
    Promising Young Woman fancies itself edgy, and relishes complicating the catharsis of something like the scene where Cassandra smashes some douchebag’s windshield with a tire iron after he yells at her on the road. But while the craft of the film is top-notch, and the writing razor-sharp, its nihilistic point of view isn’t as unprecedented as Fennell seems to think it is.
  8. Easier with Practice
    Love stories don’t come much squirmier than this one, and Alvarez plays it with honesty, insight, and the awkwardness inherent in this blindest of blind dates.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Shut Up and Play the Hits
    The true magnitude of this band no longer existing is felt most strongly in these moments, when Shut Up is at its most uplifting and danceable. It's a party Shut Up And Play The Hits decides to leave far too often.
  10. The Wedding Plan
    Turns out that, every once in a while, wedding something old to something borrowed can make something new.
  11. The Scout
    The Scout is as pretty-gloomy as an off day in New York, as winning as a good work anecdote, as defeating as another day on the job, and as listless as a generation starting to feel the shadow of their looming midlife crisis.
  12. Love, Simon
    Love, Simon is touching as a gesture. As entertainment, it’s nothing Degrassi hasn’t done better.
  13. Diplomacy
    It’s a stagy setup whose theatrical roots are always front and center, yet it’s one that’s handled with aplomb by director Volker Schlöndorff (The Tin Drum), whose latest has enough visual panache to compensate for the static, conversational nature of the work.
  14. Crime After Crime
    Through the ceaseless efforts of two dedicated pro bono lawyers-both with personal reasons to keep up the fight for five or six grueling years-director Yoav Potash follows every revelation and setback with an urgency most fiction films can't muster.
  15. Dogtooth
    It's an exhilaratingly unpredictable experience, and not an easy one to shake.
  16. In the House
    All the way up to the stunning final shot, Ozon urgently asks whether, for storytellers, it’s better to be on the outside looking in, or the inside looking out.
  17. Hal
    Though clearly aimed at fans, it presents only a chummy overview of his life and career, too superficial to work as a biography, an in-depth appreciation, or even a primer.
  18. A Face in the Crowd
    It's like an early version of Network, and it's just as overwrought, but Kazan enlivens the material with a mise en scène so vigorous that it could make anyone buy into the auteur theory. Kazan varies his shooting style, alternating between portraiture, expressionism, and docu-realism for a look and rhythm that's about 15 years ahead of its time.
  19. City of Gold
    As Gabbert alternates [Gold's] monologues with long, gliding shots of funky supermarkets and old cinemas, she makes the point these aren’t disconnected aberrations in L.A. This is the city.
  20. Rejoice and Shout
    The smartest move that McGlynn makes in Rejoice And Shout is to let those old performances run on at length.
  21. In Bloom
    Keenly observed, geographically specific portraits of adolescence are always welcome, but there’s definitely something to be said for charging the genre’s usual tender lyricism with an ever-present threat of life-altering violence.
  22. Berlin
    If nothing else, Julian Schnabel's concert film Lou Reed's Berlin presents the album's 10 songs with a force they've rarely shown before.
  23. All That Jazz
    Fosse spins his runaway narcissism into self-effacing humor and filters the darkest themes through electrifying song-and-dance numbers. The musical sequences are a lesson in choreography, not just for Fosse's renowned wit and invention in handling his dancers, but also in the editing, which fuses music and movement in perfectly timed cuts.
  24. M3GAN
    Though the contortionist-level juxtaposition of an American Girl murderbot should probably be more viscerally satisfying, Cooper’s offbeat humor and Johnstone’s ability to build tension with her characters make for a potent combination.
  25. Belushi
    Cutler takes on the ambitious task of showing not only Belushi’s impact, but how that impact wound up leading to his own ruin.
  26. God Grew Tired of Us
    It's convincing as everything but a piece of good filmmaking.
  27. Kissing Jessica Stein
    Eventually Stein's habit of dodging its own issues grows frustrating.
  28. Seabiscuit
    Though the results are a matter of record, the uplift is nevertheless intoxicating, even enough to compensate for a film that routinely substitutes corny iconography for real imagination and vision.
  29. Always Shine
    Always Shine shines brightest when it lets these women be themselves, and the filmmaking provides the dissonance.
  30. A Secret
    A Secret is suitably tense, sad, and deeply poignant as it moves toward an epilogue exploring the idea that everything rots and decays, no mater how well-maintained.
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